update

photo of updated ui and how it would look on a phone 

So I'm just posting an intermediate update to the project and explaining some of the stuff I've been working on.  So Tim and I were deciding what style we were going to go ahead with.  I was 50/50 on just doing the old style or doing a new one that might go by quicker.  Actually sort of wanted to do the old style just so we could reuse the enemies we already made, but Tim decided that he liked the comic book style at this point and I also liked it as well so we decided to make the prequel in a different more serious tone.  I guess this makes sense also because the game is more hack and slash action game that has a more simple premise of just stacking up Erik the Red's achievements in life, rather than the goofy brotherhood adventure save the world game the other was.

For the characters theres a bit of stuff I need to finish up and I would like at least one more enemy, im shooting for the ranged dps fireball thrower to give variety to the melee minion.  The goblin is an edit from the previous goblin and I just referenced Mike Mignola's style for Hellboy and his tone is just a lot darker and sharp contrast, angles, and flatter feel.  

  

So the game takes place on a miniscule 3 screens.  The first level is designed to be simple for the prototype so there were no platforms or ground angles.  I hope that if we get the gameplay going, animations in, and get a nice prototype by the end of winter i can add more background/levels in this 3 screen format like a forest, an ice level, a volcano level, playing with platforms and maybe environmental dangers.  I did all this in about 2 days and I'm pretty sure i can near finish in 3-4, so adding new levels wont be too hard for extra content, i just want to focus on getting this one done first for our winter goal.  I tried to set up the 3 screens in a sort of arc in the sense that the first screen will contain the entrance to Luis's bar (which the player can enter after missions to go to the tutorial/shop) and establish the viking village.  The 2nd screen is an intermission/transition and then the last screen is the entrance to the goblin forest which would be the second level.  My goal was to make the backgrounds a bit less saturate/cooler/darker so that the characters will pop out without any lines surrounding them.  We will hafta play the game at some point to establish if there is things we need to do to make the characters pop better.  I'm definitely still playing around with the values and how much black to put, but i think the more black the better, as is evident in a lot of Mignolas compositions.

Also sketched up roughs of spine movement for the 3 attack combo that will be achieved by linking.  Essentially the player will be rewarded with stronger attacks if they combo their attacks at the right time by pushing "A" at the correct time, rather than mashing it.  My goal is that we smooth this combo out for the first version of the game and get the linking system down and then we can add a currency program where the enemies drop viking treasure (similar to castle crashers) and the player can buy other weapons skins for swords and axes that also have different linking combos.  I think its a cheap way to add replayability to the game and give the players an extra goal for completing levels.  It may be at some point possible to only beat certain bosses with certain items requiring the player to maybe farm a lower level to get treasure, only a bit, no one likes excessive farming T_T.  Which leads me to UI

I touched briefly on the art for UI in the background shot with the characters in it but those were only the attack buttons "a" and "b" and then the DPad.  On my list of things is

The health/beard meter outliner/displaycase

The Portrait in the style of the game

The Portrait for the enemy counter on the side

KILLING SPREE style text! (getting frankie to do awesome viking voiceovers for it)

A Map of the world! (This i think is later down the line but i think we can even put it now just to show what

we plan to do and then lock the other locations like castle crashers or mario style)

Menu - I know tim has a lot of menu options that will all have to me art'd out

Backgrounds 

The bar area- 2 screen background, using luis as a template and just changing up the style a bit to match

Sky change- during differnnt stages i might change the sky color to just give the levels a little variety

Characters

Erik- cleaning him up, fixing the shield up, adding a blocking view and possibly new arms for ranged weapon

Goblin- pretty much done at this point, just cutting up and cleaning up

Shaman Goblin - Getting him styled up and doing a fireball sprite for tim (impact sprites as well)

Weapons-

Design out the sword for Erik - sprites for impact and also the combo sprite effects

If all goes well with teh linking id like to definitely add an Axe to his arsenal with similar effects

Lastly im thinking of a way to do a bow in spine, ranged attacks should be limited and ammo can be picked

up as drops, might be essential to take down ranged creeps and later bosses (thinking jumping and shooting)

anoterh weapon im thinking is chain and grappling hook which could be fun to design and think of mechanics for

Like i said the weapons and enemy variety as well as level design is what can keep this game maintainable and add content.

Wow that was a lot to say, but these are my plans for the next couple weeks.  I think its been a good last week of work and keeping this pace I believe we will end winter break with a playable game :D